In browser (Chrome / wasm32) terminal emulators

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I am aware there are a number of Rust / OpenGL terminal emulators.

The question here is: is there any that can compile to wasm32 and run in Chrome ?

XY problem: I want to run a small terminal emulator in my webapp, and possibly try to run other TUI apps on the (in browser) terminal emulator. [Yes, there will be work that needs to be done to provide a virtual file system; but the focus of this question is just getting a Rust implemented Terminal emulator to run in Chrome/wasm32]

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Not written in rust, but xterm.js is a pretty popular terminal emulator for in the browser.

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I failed to be clear about this in the original post.

  1. The rest of my app is Rust/wasm32, so I really want something in Rust and avoid the mess of wasm_bindgen

  2. I'd also prefer it to be WebGL2 / Webgpu powered rather than DOM powered, for performance reasons.

4

I just finished implementing Wasmer's JavaScript SDK, which is a Rust crate compiled with wasm-bindgen that lets you run WASI programs in the browser.

Here is the example we made which connects Bash up to an xterm.js terminal:

And here is the deployed app: https://wasmer-examples-wasmer-sh.wasmer.app/

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I'm sorry, I don't understand. Is this:

  1. a LOCAL bash using websocket to forward input<->output w/ a terminal running inside a browser

OR

  1. XYZ~ provides a virtual file system (inside the browser), and you are running bash inside the browser, with NO server support

?

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It runs everything in the browser using the browser's WebAssembly runtime and Web Workers for multi-threading/multi-processing. The instance will use a temporary in-memory filesystem that the JavaScript caller can mount a Directory to if you want to share files between the JavaScript caller and the WASI instance.

Other than needing to download the sharrattj/bash package from the Wasmer Registry, the demo doesn't require any internet access.

The package itself is just bash compiled with Wasmer's WASIX C toolchain.

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  1. This is not what I originally wanted, but this is very interesting.

  2. One thing I want is to run nushell in the browser nushell in browser · Issue #11277 · nushell/nushell · GitHub

  3. Nushell itself is written in Rust. Is there a simpler way to get nushell working ?

It sounds like the main steps are:

  1. compile nushell to wasm -- can I do this via carro build --target=wasm32-unknown-unknown, or do I need some other step ?

  2. I need to link in a virtual file system. Is there a way to do this by adding a pkg to cargo .toml and writing some code, instead of via emscriptsen ?

  3. I need a way to load the wasm from js. This looks similar to the way how JS code typically load Rust compiled wasm32 modujles.

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